It's a real risk. This is basically what happened with XMPP. Google became big enough to screw over the rest of the XMPP world.

Google took "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" right out of Microsoft's play book, and at this point it's just standard operating procedure for any major tech company.

Many people here and on Mastodon were afraid Meta was doing the same thing with Threads a few months back when there was talk of federation (I think they eventually backpedaled on that).

I think we're okay as long as the big players are open source, and no one instance has an overwhelmingly large share of the user base. I would recommend new Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin users to join an instance that is NOT the most popular (or even in the top 3), in order to maintain some balance in the ecosystem. lemmy.world and kbin.social are many times larger than the #2 biggest instances, and that's not ideal.

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

I'm gonna start my own instance, with hookers and blackjack

Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.

But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.

That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.

Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.

To be clear, that's not "enshittification". Just an undesirable development. Also not a worst case scenario, imo. The segmentation of Lemmy/the Fediverse is its biggest strength, tbh, where a problematic instance can be easily blocked or cut off by any individual admin.

What's a good mirror instance that is federated with "everybody" to have an account with so you can access all the defederated communities and content if you want for a more liberal account?

I agree, the fediverse is not immune to certain types of problems that come with wider adoption and concentration of power in the hands of the most popular instances; however, the fact it’s rather trivial for other instances to sprout up is its own sort of booster shot against any kind of bullshittery that royally effs the users.

Sure. But then I say “bye bye.

no mainstream

No, you definitely aren't alone in thinking that and to an extent I agree: it is likely for the platform to get shittier in some ways as it grows or matures.

I am hoping that a combination of the design philosophy of Lemmy/Fediverse, incremental improvements to Lemmy and both users and moderators continuing to engage as genuinely as they can, will slow the negatives while growing the positives, and further avoid the pitfalls that centralized social media fall into.

Lemmy is basically guaranteed to fail the exact same way reddit did. More and more users flock to a few centralized instances (some of which are already starting to show very biased and manipulative administration...) which increases hosting costs and so forth. This leads to a need/desire to monetize and, no matter what people pretend, donations are not a viable path.

Which leads to shittier monetization approaches. Which get exacerbated by people being willing to pay a monthly subscription to the app creators to load the content, but not the sites that actually host it.

Peertube, at best, will be the phpbb to the vbulletins of the world, for subscription based websites for influencers. Sort of like how mastodon is the core of a few of the right wing shitholes. Not sure what the "educational" gun nuts are doing on their site, but I am sure it is only a matter of time until Ludwig or Toast try a premium site for their side hustles. They won't federate and they'll be behind paywalls but they'll save a lot on licensing. And, more likely, peertube will go down in a mess of CSAM and gorn.

Mastodon I actually see surviving. In a good-ish world, we'll see it being part of a decentralized social media that is resistant to corporate interests. News media and Brands will have their own instances that federate in to protect them from a deranged child of apartheid spamming swastikas everywhere. Is it facebook's twitter that is also compatible with mastodon? And I can see a world where a couple dozen major "instances" carry on. And this also actually provides a venue (and honeypot...) for social activism and sexwork.

But... most likely mastodon will become like usenet. It exists, a few people love it, but mostly it is just something your ISP might forget they are offering.

Isn't usenet a closed - as in non-publicly-anonymously-accessible - platform?

HTTP did pretty well though. :-)